It's always been said that FA Cup third round weekend is one of the highlights of the season football wise in this country.

It's when the big guns come into the competition with the minnows, when the bakers and the postmen sometimes share the same ground as the £30,000 a week elite, and every now and then the millionaires get their comeuppance.

I've always found however, that if you are the supporter of a lower division league side and your team has got knocked out in the first or second round, it just happens to be one of the most depressing weekends of the year. You wish your team was rubbing shoulders with the top clubs but they are not.

I'm sure I was not the only 'O' unhappy at not having a game last weekend, and the pain was made even worse this year knowing that we could have been at Stamford Bridge cheering on East London's finest, if circumstances had allowed. One of the most painful things to have witnessed this season was the sight of Scunthorpe supporters queuing for tickets to see their team take on Chelsea, knowing that it could have been us.

Upon seeing it my mind just flashed back instantly to Ollie Palmer, the goal at his mercy, time running out, in the first game with Scunny at Brisbane Road, the great man unable to even force a save from the Scunny keeper. In many ways the disappointment reflected just how the season has panned out for us over the past four months.

It's Exeter on Saturday and it's strange to think that when we played them back in September the O's were sitting top of the league, having just won the first five and talk among some of the Leyton faithful, was that automatic promotion was a real possibility and that to end up merely in the play-offs would be something of a let down.

Now just 18 weeks later I'd bite your hand off just to be in that top seven come May. So just where has it all gone wrong? Even the staunchest of Ian Hendon's critics would have to concede that we've been somewhat unlucky when it's come to injuries. All sides pick them up, but most of ours appear to have been long term which has been unfortunate.

Losing Dean Cox for six months has undoubtedly been the biggest blow, the tiny legend generally being regarded by everyone as being one of the division's top players, and then there has been Paul McCallum, Sammy Moore, Connor Essam and now Lloyd James all missing for seemingly an eternity.

Things may not be too good at the moment and there appears a lot of unhappiness about Hendon but at the end of the day we are Leyton Orient and we've seen worse over the years.

I'm old enough to remember Christmas 1999 when we lost at home to Swansea in December to make us the 92nd club out of 92 in the four divisions. Only a Carl Griffiths hat-trick at Chester in a 5-1 win some five days later prevented us from entering the new century as officially the worst side in the league.

Let's face it, when we all signed the contract to become Orient fans, in my case after my dad took me to my first game in 1967, we were basically resigning ourselves to a life of heartache and pain, tempered only by the odd triumph every ten years or so, and things are no different now some 50 years later.

So what of the remainder of the season? Well for me so much now hangs on our business in the January transfer window.

The brightest spark about the season so far has undoubtedly been the form of course of Jay Simpson. Certainly in my opinion the best English striker we've had at the club since Peter Kitchen (remember Carl Griffiths was Welsh and Gianvito Plasmati was born in Matera, which is in Italy), but this brings its own problems.

I wasn't around at the time but I would imagine the last Orient forward to attract any interest in any January transfer window was Tommy Johnston, but for sure when you've got the country's leading scorer in your ranks there's bound to be people looking at your man from many a side playing in a higher division.

Even if we do manage to hang on to Simmo, its obvious to everyone that we still need another three or four decent players if we are to push for a top seven finish come May.

Apart from Simpson, the only other 'O' to have had a more than decent season so far has been Alex Cisak. Lets hope everybody's favourite Italian, Francesco Becchetti is able to give some funds to Hendon and Andy Hessenthaler so that he can 'kick start' our season once more (this time without the need to visit the FA's disciplinary committee).

There is still hope. The division is so poor that a run of three or four wins in a row can push anyone in the league up to a possible play-off place, and even though we all concede that an Orient top seven finish will inevitably mean a semi-final victory followed by a day of tears at Wembley, at least it would mean something of an improvement bearing in mind what us Leyton Orient supporters have gone through the past 20 months.

And if the miracle was to happen and we ended up gaining promotion I'm sure even Ollie's Scunthorpe miss would be forgotten eventually.

Up the O's.

Martin has been writing every month for the last 28 years in the Orient fanzine the 'Leyton Orientear', the second longest running fanzine in the country.